Monday, August 18, 2008

Theme author says Downing Street did not pay him

The other day it was noted that the new Number 10 website had used a Wordpress theme and failed to acknowledge the original theme author and also claimed Crown Copyright on the whole site. The author of the theme Anthony Baggett has left a comment saying:

"Hi guys, I'm the theme author and can't find any record of them paying for the theme. I'm not sure at this point what my options are, but I'm looking into it."

What exactly this means for the New Media Maze MD, Dave who commented on Mike Rouse's blog I do not know. Apparently he is "looking into it". Let's see what antbag.com has to say about this.

6 comments:

Being someone with no life, one of the comments elsewhere caused me to do a quick host lookup on the number 10 site. Which turns out to be a CNAME pointing at a CNAME which according to the RFC's is a very naughty thing indeed and likely to cause things to not work very well.

$ host www.number10.gov.uk

www.number10.gov.uk is an alias for www.number10.gov.uk.edgesuite.net.

www.number10.gov.uk.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1281.b.akamai.net.

Good to see more evidence of such high quality IT practices within government. ( ignoring the 20 odd xhtml errors ).

DNSpedant I'm not up with IT best practices, but akamai (and edgesuite) are a server load-distribution service who've been around for years. It makes sense for a site expecting as much traffic as Number10 to be using such a service to stop their servers falling over under the weight of traffic. FWIW the FBI have a not dissimilar setup.